"Recondite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... language, and equalled by few. That he has obvious and great defects, that he is wholly and in all probability deliberately careless of formal smoothness, that he adopted the fancy of his time for quaint and recondite expression with an almost perverse vigour, and set the example of the topsy-turvified conceits which came to a climax in Crashaw and Cleveland, that he is almost impudently licentious in thought and imagery at times, that he alternates ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Nothing in Philosophy was unknown to him; but every Thing in it had the Grace and Force of Novelty. And as Novelty is one main Source of Admiration, we are not to wonder that He has perpetual Allusions to the most recondite Parts of the Sciences: and This was done not so much out of Affectation, as the Effect of Admiration begot by Novelty. Then, as to his Style and Diction, we may much more justly apply to SHAKESPEARE, what a celebrated Writer has ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... life so destitute of charm and dignity; and then you call to memory that had he chosen, had he ceased to be a miser, he could have been freed at once from these trials, and might have built himself a castle and gone escorted by a squadron. For the love of more recondite joys, which we cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy, the man had willingly forgone both comfort and consideration. "His mind to him a kingdom was"; and sure enough, digging into that mind, which seems at first a dust-heap, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Electric Waves,' on the 29th January 1897. "There is, however, to our thinking" wrote the Spectator at the time "something of rare interest in the spectacle presented of a Bengalee of the purest descent possible, lecturing in London to an audience of appreciative European savants upon one of the most recondite branches of the modern physical science." He was then invited to address the Scientific Societies in Paris. "Prof. J. C. Bose" wrote the Review Encyclopedique, Paris "exhibited on the 9th of March before the Sorbonne, an apparatus of his invention for demonstrating the laws of reflection, refraction, ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... whose images was well-nigh unbounded. The passion for intricate and far-sought metaphor which had possessed Donne was accompanied in his work and even more in that of his followers with a passion for what was elusive and recondite in thought and emotion and with an increasing habit of rudeness and wilful difficultness in language and versification. Against these ultimate licences of a great artistic period, the classical writers invoked the qualities of smoothness and lucidity, in the same way, so they fancied, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... afterwards all eyes dimly recognise it, on its being shown to them, as something more vivid than their own faint experience, yet either kindred to it, or virtually one and the same. Almost all human nature can, in some measure, understand and feel the most exquisite and recondite image which only the rarest genius could produce. Were it not so, great poets might break their harps, and go ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... border-families who had never heard of such a thing; that it contained many words and expressions hitherto entirely unknown in the particular dialect in which it was written; and, moreover, that it multiplied complicated and recondite patterns of tartans in a manner so remarkable that Sir Walter Scott, to whom part of Mr. Sobieski Stuart's transcript of the ancient MS. was submitted, was led to suspect "that information as to its origin might be obtained even in a less romantic site than the cabin of ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... positively refuse. I will not say another word. There are limits. Only an abstruse theologian with a taste for the more recondite niceties of obscure heresies could ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... established their kingdom of Septimania, till the year 713, when they were expelled by the Moors of Spain, who ushered in an unillumined period of four centuries, of which no traces remain. These facts I derive from a source no more recondite than a pamphlet by M. Viollet-le-Duc—a very luminous description of the fortifications, which you may buy from the accomplished custodian. The writer makes a jump to the year 1209, when Carcassonne, then forming part of the realm ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... results of your reflection are found to contain unexplained contradictions, just because you have not yet fitted on the fact on which you are reflecting to everything else there is to know. All the assumptions of every-day 'common sense' and all the more recondite assumptions of the sciences are saturated with these contradictions, because both 'common sense' and the sciences leave so much of the whole 'story of everything' untouched. If the whole story were told, all ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... better to make use only of what is spontaneously presented to our senses, and of which we cannot remain ignorant, provided we bestow on it any reflection, however slight, than to concern ourselves about more uncommon and recondite phenomena: the reason of which is, that the more uncommon often only mislead us so long as the causes of the more ordinary are still unknown; and the circumstances upon which they depend are almost ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... which enter into the fame of a public man are few and by no means recondite. The man who fills a great station in a period of change, who leads his country successfully through a time of crisis; who, by his power of persuading and controlling others, has been able to command the best thought of his age, so as to leave his country in a moral or material condition ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... semblance of one of her own great-aunts, listened languidly to the kind of talk that the originals might have exchanged about the same table when New York gentility centred in the Battery and the Bowling Green. Mr. Dagonet was always pleasant to see and hear, but his sarcasms were growing faint and recondite: they had as little bearing on life as the humours of a Restoration comedy. As for Mrs. Marvell and Miss Ray, they seemed to the young man even more spectrally remote: hardly anything that mattered to him existed for ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... thrown, by his individual tastes and turn of thought, upon the study of political philosophy; but the Englishman, taken as a public writer, commonly addresses himself to practical legislation rather than to recondite studies or logical analysis and investigation of the relations between mankind and their regulations under authorised powers. Since Lord Bacon there have been few, excepting in our later times Mill, ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... laziness, and yet absolving him from that particular charge of which his own knowledge enables him to judge. In the trust that I may be able to clear him from a few more charges, I write these pages, premising that I do not profess to have access to any new and recondite documents. I merely take the broad facts of the story from documents open to all; and comment on them as every man should wish his own life ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... great gifts and boundless possibilities as to life and godliness, and on the other diligence as the condition on which all these shall actually become ours, and, passing into our lives, will there produce all these graces which the Apostle goes on to enumerate. The condition is nothing recondite, nothing hard either to understand or to practise, but it is simply that commonplace, humdrum virtue of diligence. If we will put it forth, then the gifts that God has given, and which are not really ours unless we put it forth, will pass into the very substance of our being, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... have assured this existence by fostering applause and pecuniary compensation. Nature, thus prodigal of gifts to America, has, in a crowning act of munificence, conferred also a painter, capable of interpreting her own most recondite mysteries, and of faithfully transcribing the beauties revealed to all ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... person is very often, apparently at least, stupid; a stupid, intractable person is, therefore, called a DUNCE: one who is deaf and intractable. What now becomes of Duns Scotus, and all the rest of the recondite observations bestowed ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... Virgin than 'en menageant un triomphe a son Fils dans la personne de son Vicaire.' It would be a triumph which the Catholic world would salute with transport. Hints of this sort, the sense of which was not hard to read, in spite of their recondite phraseology, reached him from every quarter. He feared to set them aside. The origins of his power were too much tainted for him to advance boldly on an independent policy. Thus it was that bit by bit he deliberately forfeited all title to the help ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... their new polish, and the statues retained the brilliant colors with which they were originally painted, and the shrines their rich gilding, of which the sunlight still shows a glimmer or a streak, though the sunbeam itself looks tarnished with antique dust. Yet this recondite portion of the Abbey presents few memorials of personages whom we care to remember. The shrine of Edward the Confessor has a certain interest, because it was so long held in religious reverence, and because the very dust that settled upon it was formerly worth ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... primeval heathenism, but had applied the visible sign by which all, from generation to generation, had been admitted into the bosom of the Church. This might seem to afford a cause sufficient in itself for the effect, yet it appears to have been aided by other causes more recondite and mysterious. Notwithstanding all the trash talked about Druids and other persons of this kind, we know extremely little of the heathenism of the British Isles. The little that we do know is learned from the meagre notices which the biographers of the saints have furnished of that which the saints ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... and circulation of the blood, hints of magnetism and electricity, a solar system, a plurality of worlds, the earth's shape, inclined axis, situation in space, and connection with other spheres, the separate existence of disembodied life, the laws of optics, much of recondite natural history:—all these can be easily proved to be alluded to in detached, or ingeniously compared, passages of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is very likely, however, that Huntington has anticipated some of this, although I have never met ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... more, why should we add "fictitious"? The reason why is obvious. The reason why not, if something more recondite, does not want for weight. The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or of an imaginary series. Boswell's "Life of Johnson" (a work of cunning and inimitable art) owes its success to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... poets. 'It was well for Shakspeare,' he remarked, 'that he gave himself to the drama. It was that which forced him to be sufficiently human. His poems would otherwise, from the extraordinarily metaphysical character of his genius, have been too recondite to be understood. His youthful poems, in spite of their unfortunate and unworthy subjects, and his sonnets also, reveal this tendency. Nothing can surpass the greatness of Shakspeare where he is at his greatest; but it is wrong to speak of him as if even he were perfect. He had serious ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... consideration. Suffice it to say, that for my own part, diligence hath not been wanting in the research. Johnson's Dictionary and old Bailey, have been ransacked; but neither the learned Johnson, nor the recondite Bailey, throw much light upon this matter. The Slang Dictionary, to which I should in the first place have directed my attention, was unfortunately not within my reach. The result of all my inquiries amounts to this—that bore, boor, and boar, are all three spelt indifferently, and consequently ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... this game is called 'Recondite Forms' because— But you will understand it better after you have played it. I want pencils ...
— Harper's Young People, November 18, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... who is the greater on the whole may in some respects be inferior to the lesser. Perhaps the reader will say that these are truisms. To be sure they are. And yet if he considers only the judgments which are every day pronounced, he may easily be led to believe that these truisms are most recondite truths now for the first time revealed. When Liszt after his first return from Switzerland did not find Thalberg himself, he tried to satisfy his curiosity by a careful examination of that pianist's compositions. The conclusions he came to be set ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... purifications, incantations, and sacrifices. They possessed a traditional knowledge which had come down from father to son, and which none thought of questioning. The laity looked up to them as the sole possessors of a recondite wisdom of the last ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... must have made him familiar: in the expectation that the discovery of the sources of moral approbation and disapprobation, in this comparatively easy case, may furnish the means of detecting them where they are more recondite. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. . . But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... history; nearly became the epitaph of a Ministry; certainly was the funeral wail over a carefully-constructed Budget. The SQUIRE to-night felt bound to observe tradition; but in accordance with his nature did it modestly, adventuring nothing more recondite than citation of the familiar line that serves to mark WREN'S resting-place in Westminster Abbey. TOMMY BOWLES took opportunity of remarking that he was "disappointed with the Budget." This mental attitude, though not quite unexpected, threw fresh gloom over proceedings, and talk, reduced ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... recognizes the accomplished gentlewoman of a hundred years ago, with her solid reading, her strong common sense, her sober religious convictions, her household science. No doubt she loved fine lace and old china; there are recondite internal proofs that she was pretty; and on closing the book a far-off rustle of her brocade reaches us as she makes her spreading curtsey. But we will let her speak for herself a little. Her first position is certainly a strong one: "If this haughty sex would have us believe they have a natural ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... Browning ever wrote a poem the writing of which he more enjoyed. The creation of Karshish suited his humour and his quaint play with recondite knowledge. He describes the physician till we see him alive and thinking, in body and soul. The creation of Lazarus is even a higher example of the imaginative power of Browning; and that it is shaped for us through the mind of Karshish, and in tune with it, makes the imaginative ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... life—individual, convincing, complete, and as various as humanity itself. He excels in that most difficult art of presenting the outward characteristics of persons, calling up before the imagination not only the details of their physical appearance, but the more recondite effects of their manner and their bearing, so that, when he has finished, one almost feels that one has met the man. But his excellence does not stop there. It is upon the inward creature that he expends his most lavish care—upon the soul that sits behind the eyelids, upon the purpose ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... written with admirable good taste and judgment, and with notable self-restraint. It does not weary the reader with critical discursiveness, nor with attempts to search out high-flown meanings and recondite oracles in the plain 'yea' and 'nay' of life. It is a graceful and unpretentious little biography, and tells all that need be told concerning one of the greatest writers of the time. It is a deeply interesting if not fascinating woman ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... that attempts only to speak of things visible to the bodily eye, express the mighty emotion that inwardly agitated him, when he approached, for the first time, a volume which he believed to be replete with the recondite and mystic philosophy of antiquity: his cheeks glowed, his eyes became bright, his whole frame trembled, and his entire attention was immediately swallowed up in the depths of contemplation. The rapid and vigorous conversion of his ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... necessary to the attainment of proper skill in managing the processes and instruments of an industry. The acquisition of the rudiments of education, and, in many cases, the most profound knowledge of chemistry, physics and recondite studies, are essential to production; and teachers are indirect laborers in producing almost every article in the market. In this country, especially, are inventors a class of indirect laborers essential to all ultimate production as it ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... and a mason, had his month full of chisels and his tail a trowel. The bipes implumis, on the contrary, was hatched nude, without even the embryo of a pin-feather. There was nothing for him but the recondite capabilities of his two talented, but talonless hands, and a large brain almost without instinct. Nothing was ready-made, only the means of making. He was brought into the infinite world a finite deity, an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... world."[14448] But the balance of advantage and disadvantage does not even now always reconcile traders to a definite and tangible loss; and in the ruder times of which we are writing it was not to be expected that arguments of so refined and recondite a character should be very sensibly felt. Tyre and Sidon recognised in Alexandria a rival from the first, and grew more and more jealous of her as time went on. She monopolised the trade in Egyptian commodities from ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... "Explain your recondite allusion," said the grey-flannelled host; and Jimmy, understanding him to say, "What do you mean?" replied with the whole tale of that wonderful night when the statues came alive, and a banquet of unearthly splendour and deliciousness was plucked by marble ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... with Lady Mary, and she was I saw an inch taller than his squat solidity. A tall lady in rose-pink had taken possession of Guy, Evesham and Lady Ladislaw made the two centres of a straggling group who were bandying recondite political allusions. Then came one or two couples and trios with nothing very much to say and active ears. Philip and I brought up the rear silently and in all humility. Even young Guy had gone over our heads. I was too full of a stupendous ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... form of the animal. These are all cases of asexual multiplication, and there are other instances, and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with those little green insects, the 'Aphis' or blight, as it is called. These little animals, during a very considerable part of their existence, multiply themselves by means of a kind of internal ...
— The Perpetuation Of Living Beings, Hereditary Transmission And Variation • Thomas H. Huxley
... we doff our caps, whether they jingle or not, as you please; and if thou thinkest, good reader, that 'twere folly to lose a life for such a cause, the bells will match the rest of thy garb. The learning, too, of the censors and critics was often indeed remarkable. They condemned a recondite treatise on Trigonometry, because they imagined it contained heretical opinions concerning the doctrine of the Trinity; and another work which was devoted to the study of Insects was prohibited, because they concluded that it was a secret attack upon the Jesuits. Well might ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... The language used should be as ready and as efficient a conductor of the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader as is the electric spark which passes from one battery to another battery. In all written matter the spark should carry everything; but in matters recondite the recipient will search to see that he misses nothing, and that he takes nothing away too much. The novelist cannot expect that any such search will be made. A young writer, who will acknowledge the truth of what I am saying, will often feel himself tempted ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... what sense of envy or design of mischief; his white, handsome face (which I beheld with loathing) looked in upon us at all hours across the fence; and once, from a safe distance, he avenged himself by shouting a recondite island insult, to us quite inoffensive, on his English ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... original business—that of a conveyancer and title hunter, and drawer-up of recondite documents of all sorts—was considerably increased by receiving the master's office. There was now great work for scriveners. Not only must I push the clerks already with me, but I must have additional ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... eminent degree the talent of quotation, which is one of the happiest gifts of the popular orator. It is worthy of note that this manufacturer, this man of the people, this Manchester man, shows a familiarity with the more dainty, outlying, recondite literature of the world than is shown by any other member of a house composed chiefly ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... rapacious, ratiocination, rational, raucous, recalcitrant, recant, recapitulate, recession, reciprocal, reciprocate, recluse, recondite, recreant, recrudescence, rectilinear, rectitude, recumbent, redactor, redress, redound, refractory, refulgent, rejuvenate, relevant, rendezvous, rendition, reparation, repercussion, repertory, replenish, replete, replevin, reprehend, reprobate, repulsive, requisite, rescind, residue, residuum, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... such an occasion. Yet it might possibly be mentioned that a poet of the highest order would have produced the effect by more direct means. Remorse overpowering and absorbing does not embody itself in these recondite and, one may almost say, over-ingenious fancies. Hawthorne does not give us so much the pure passion as some of its collateral effects. He is still more interested in the curious psychological problem than moved by sympathy with the torture of the soul. We pity poor Mr. Dimmesdale profoundly, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... instead of this recondite learning adapted to feed the mind, not the body, you have recourse, at need, to your hands and your handiwork, there is no call for deceit, your trade is ready when required. Honour and honesty will not stand in the way of your living. You need no longer cringe and lie ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... breath of song, that as the wind Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows. Demand of lilies wherefore they are white, Extort her crimson secret from the rose, But ask not of the Muse that she disclose The meaning of the riddle of her might: Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite, Save the enigma of herself, she knows. The master could not tell, with all his lore, Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped; Ev'n as the linnet sings, so I, he said;— Ah, rather as the imperial nightingale, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... and as the same episode occurs in the story of Sinbad the Sailor, Jubinal has set himself to speculate how that story, or the Arabian Nights in which it is incorporated, came to be known in Ireland. I confess I do not agree with him. In the first place, the notion is not particularly recondite, and it has at least this possible foundation in fact, that, as I have been told by sailors, the back of a whale of advanced years, when asleep at the surface, may be and has been mistaken from some distance, greatly owing ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... we all very well know that the shaft of Bertrand de Gourdon put an end to the royal hero—and that from that 29th of March he never robbed nor murdered any more. And we have legends in recondite books of the manner of the ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... disposing of it. In one such book, for example, I come upon this: "What all the skill and constructive capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War failed to accomplish Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful femininity and nobility of soul." In other words, by her possession of some recondite and indescribable magic, sharply separated from the ordinary mental processes of man. The theory is unsound and preposterous. Miss Nightingale accomplished her useful work, not by magic, but by hard ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... question of individuality, a subject quite too large and too recondite for present discussion. The conclusion of the whole matter, however, is, that individuality—that very ground of being as distinguished from thing—is not attained in Nature at one leap. If anywhere truly exemplified in plants, it is only in the lowest and simplest, where the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... difficult of comprehension. In the first place, the sudden change in the direction of the vital energy (which, whatever view we take of it and its origin, is acknowledged by all schools of philosophy as most recondite, and as the motive power) must produce results of some kind. In the second, Theosophy shows, as we said before, that a man consists of several men pervading each other, and on this view (although it is very difficult to express the idea in language) it is but natural that the progressive ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Funeral," "A Death in the Desert." It was long before England recognised that in B. she had received one of the greatest of her poets, and the causes of this lie on the surface. His subjects were often recondite and lay beyond the ken and sympathy of the great bulk of readers; and owing, partly to the subtle links connecting the ideas and partly to his often extremely condensed and rugged expression, the treatment of them was not seldom difficult and obscure. Consequently for long he appealed to ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... time-table, and remarked in a wise way that he hoped Julian would "make the connection" at Derby. Lastly he predicted the precise minute at which Julian "ought" to be knocking at the front door. And both women felt their ignorant, puzzled inferiority in these recondite matters of travel, and the comfort of having an omniscient male in ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the Mandans, say Lewis and Clarke, (vol. i. p. 138,) consists in the belief of one Great Spirit. As their belief in a Supreme Being is firm and sincere, so their gratitude to Him is fervent and unvarying. They are tormented by no false philosophy, led astray by no recondite opinions of controversialists, whether He is all in all, or shares a "divided throne." Simple and unenlightened sons of nature, they hold the belief which has never failed to present itself to such, that there is a God, and to be grateful and worship that God is the second innate ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... mind that in the eagerness of my recondite investigation, I was keeping the poor man from his dinner. My bowels yearned with sympathy, and putting in his hand a small token of my gratitude and goodness, I departed with a hearty benediction on him, Dame Honeyball, and the parish club of Crooked Lane—not forgetting my shabby, but sententious ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... it would be presumptuous in me to pretend to instruct Mr. Gladstone in matters which lie as much within the province of Literature and History as in that of Science; but if any one desirous of further knowledge will be so good as to turn to that most excellent and by no means recondite source of information, the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," he will find, under the letter E, the word "Evolution," and a long article on that subject. Now, I do not recommend him to read the first half of the article; but ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... rude ore; still the ore is not the metal. Nay sometimes, and not unfrequently in Shakespeare, the introduction of unpoetical matter may be necessary for the sake of relief, or as a vivid expression of recondite conceptions, and (as it were) to make friends with the reader's imagination. This necessity, however, cannot make the additions in themselves beautiful and pleasing. Sometimes, on the other hand, while we do not deny the incidental beauty of a poem, we are ashamed and indignant on witnessing ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... first study." For, lo, I would readily forget the wanderings of Aeneas and all the rest, rather than how to read and write. But over the entrance of the Grammar School is a vail drawn! true; yet is this not so much an emblem of aught recondite, as a cloak of error. Let not those, whom I no longer fear, cry out against me, while I confess to Thee, my God, whatever my soul will, and acquiesce in the condemnation of my evil ways, that I may love Thy good ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... that we should comply with all the principles of etiquette, so that were words of this kind to be used, they would besides be coarse and inappropriate; and may it please you to fix upon something else more recondite and abstruse." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... personages of the tale, both law-abiding and lawless, came from various sources which, perhaps, here and there, some reader may have recognized. They are not very recondite. But I am not concerned here to legitimize any of those people, and even as to my general view of the moral reactions as between the criminal and the police all I will venture to say is that it seems to me to be at ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the elevations and pauses greater facility of understanding the poetry. For the choral songs are, and ever must have been, the most difficult part of the tragedy; there occur in them the most involved verbal compounds, the newest expressions, the boldest images, the most recondite allusions. Is it credible that the poets would, one and all, have been thus prodigal of the stores of art and genius, if they had known that in the representation the whole must have been lost to the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... incandescent light Has banished the tallow candle; And the ox-cart is gone at steam's rapid flight, But Love is too subtle, is too recondite For Learning or Genius to handle. All honor to Science, let her keep her mad pace, I abate not a tittle her zeal; But the splendors of life can never efface The picture of Ruth in plain rustic grace Who wrought at the Old ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... quality; nor has it any of Debussy's withdrawals. One thinks, as a discerning commentator has observed, of the "broad Shakespearian daylight" of Fitzgerald's fine phrase as being not inapplicable to the atmosphere of MacDowell's writing. He has few reservations, and he shows small liking for recondite effects of harmonic colour, for the wavering melodic line—which is far from implying that he is ever merely obvious or banal: that he never is. His clarity, his directness, find issue in an order of expression at once lucid ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... commonly said that modern war is the most recondite of things, requiring experts. War, so long as man risks his skin in it, will always be a matter ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... don't doubt you will do ample justice to its attractions," observed my right-hand neighbor. "From the size of your note-book, and the industry with which you accumulate useful information, I should presume that you are a conscientious observer of all that is recondite and curious." ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... The real nation, busy with the problem of eating, dying, and being born all in one room, has never heard of either Tennyson or Swinburne or George R. Sims.) There are poems of Tennyson, of Wordsworth, even of the speciously recondite Browning, that have entered into the general consciousness. But nothing of Swinburne's! Swinburne had no moral ideas to impart. Swinburne never publicly yearned to meet his Pilot face to face. He never galloped on one of Lord George ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... He must be a dull man who can examine the exquisite structure of a comb, so beautifully adapted to its end, without enthusiastic admiration. We hear from mathematicians that bees have practically solved a recondite problem, and have made their cells of the proper shape to hold the greatest possible amount of honey, with the least possible consumption of precious wax in their construction. It has been remarked that a skilful workman, with fitting tools and measures, would find it very difficult to make ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... construction on the Prayer Book, and explain away the plain meaning of the baptismal and other offices,—have always been found the most bitter opponents of a conscientious and consistent dissent. There are tendencies in human nature, not of a very recondite order, on which the fact may easily ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... that, wishing to give his work an original air, he converted the aforesaid plays into tales. Cazotte's story of the Indian plays savours somewhat of the cock and the bull and it is probable that the Hezar o Yek Roz (which is not, to my knowledge, extant) was not derived from so recondite a source, but was itself either the original of the well-known Turkish collection or (perhaps) a translation of the latter. At all events, Zeyn Alasnam, Codadad and the Princess of Deryabar occur in a copy (cited by ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... very similar, yet the intention and meaning are different. In the Conception it is the sinless Virgin in her personal character, who is held up to reverence, as the purest, wisest, holiest, of created beings. The earlier theme involves a yet more recondite signification. It is, undoubtedly, to be regarded as an attempt on the part of the artist to express, in a visible form, the idea or promise of the redemption of the human race, as existing in the ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... Mr. Greville, it was getting to be fatiguing—these two improbable Frenchmen. I suppose the small man took my English as some recondite insult, for he drew himself up, clicked his heels together, and said, 'I shall have the honor to send to monsieur those who will ask him, for me,—for me, personally,—to translate his words, and, I trust, to withdraw the offensive statement which, no doubt, they ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... (Vol. ii., p. 153.) has propounded a dozen of most recondite and puzzling archaisms, upon which I have to offer ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... time, however, the future Astronomer Royal was steadily advancing in astronomical inquiries of a recondite nature. He had investigated the obliquity of the ecliptic with extreme care, so far as the circumstances of astronomical observation would at that time permit. He had also sought to discover the sun's distance ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... was as much as I could do to answer the numerous keen and incisive questions which he put to me. They were all so distinct and cogent. Their object was, of course, to draw from me the necessary explanations on this rather recondite subject. I believe, however, that notwithstanding the presence of Royalty, I was enabled to place all the most striking and important features of the Moon's surface in a clear and satisfactory manner before Her Majesty and ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has another and more important ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chivalry, philosophy will be mine. I shall listen to their music perpetually and their colours will dance before my eyes. I shall soar from terraces of stone upon dragons with shining wings and make war upon Olympus. From the peaks of hills I shall swoop into recondite valleys and drive the pigmies, shrieking little curses, to their caverns. It may be my whim to wander through infinite parks where the deer lie under the clustering shadow of their antlers and flee lightly over the grass; to whisper with white prophets under the elms or bind a child with a daisy-chain ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... Oriental apologue, myth and tale combined, which, by amusing narrative and romantic adventure, insinuates a lesson in morals or in humanity, of which we often in our days must fail to perceive the drift. The book of Apuleius, before quoted, is subject to as many discoveries of recondite meaning as is Rabelais. As regards the licentiousness of the Milesian fables, this sign of semi-civilization is still inherent in most Eastern books of the description which we call "light literature," and the ancestral tale-teller never collects a ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... fortissimo form. For the player and for the hearer this piece, when well treated, is one of the most pleasing piano solos possible to mention. I do not know, however, that it is necessary to turn it wrong side out in the effort to find some hidden or recondite meaning. It is pleasing and well made rather than deeply impassioned, and it is a mistake to overdo the contrasts ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... confederation, 'a solemn league and conspiracy, might take place among the infinite generations of ghosts against the single generation of men at any one time composing the garrison of death.' Deeming this subject too recondite for his juvenile audience, he dropped it, and commenced a course of lectures upon physics. 'This undertaking arose from some one of us envying or admiring flies for their power of walking upon the ceiling. 'Poh!' said he, 'they are impostors; they pretend to do it, but they can't do it ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is to sketch the mental state of the priests of Italy, so far as my opportunities enabled me to judge. The subject is more recondite than the foregoing; the facts are less accessible; and my statements must partake more of the inferential than did those embraced in the former ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... strange: nothing is so becoming to a man as an air of mystery. Mystery is the very key-stone of all that is beautiful in poetry, all that is sacred in faith, and all that is recondite in transcendental psychology. I am writing a ballad which is all mystery; it is 'such stuff as dreams are made of,' and is, indeed, stuff made of a dream; for, last night I fell asleep as usual over ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... no moments of satisfaction of any variety, although there was no disapprobation expressed by any one, except in one or two characteristically recondite comments by Professor Kennedy, who was taking a rather uneasy triumph in the proof of an old theory of his as to Sylvia's character. One afternoon, at a football game, he came up to her on the grandstand, shook hands with Jermain Fiske, whom he had flunked innumerable times in algebra, and remarked ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... continued to vibrate strongly, and gave out in unison the loud, humming note that had originally attracted Constans's attention. It was undoubtedly, a form of motor whose power was derived from some secret property of vibratory bodies, a recondite subject to which his books alluded but obscurely. Yet in the years immediately preceding the Great Change the principle seems to have been reduced to practical utility. Here was the engine in actual operation, and whatever its source ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... that dull season of the year, except the theatres, and for those places of entertainment Mrs. Pallinson cherished a shuddering aversion. But there were occasional morning and evening "recitals," or concerts, where the music for the most part was of a classical and recondite character—feasts of melody, at which long-buried and forgotten sonatas of Gluck, or Bach, or Chembini were introduced to a discriminating public for the first time; and to these Mrs. Pallinson and Theobald conducted poor Adela Branston, whose musical proclivities had never yet ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... careful trout, for pundits skilled and wary, That use upon the chalk, Plump and recondite, dubious and chary— On such ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... denies the freedom of the will, is supported by names of great consideration, is cheerfully granted. No man, for example, was ever endowed with a genius more commanding, with logical powers more acute, with a faculty more surprising of writing on recondite subjects with force, perspicuity, and nervous eloquence, than President Edwards. Nevertheless, the correctness of his views is not implicitly to be inferred from his ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... our philosophizing and analysis. It seems to let out with the fulness, simplicity, and unconsciousness of a child—"Fancy's Child"—the secret mechanism or procession of the greatest creative mind our race has produced. In itself, it has no recondite meaning, it answers fully its own sweet purpose. We are not believers, like some folks, in the omniscience of even Shakspeare. But, like many things that he and other wise men and many simple children say, it has a germ of universal meaning, which it ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... bargained for. Ostensibly engaged with the life of the Bobbin Boy, we are covertly introduced to the majority of all the boys that ever were born and came to anything. The advertised story is a kind of mother-hen who gathers under her wings a numerous brood of biographical chicks. Quantities of recondite erudition are poured out on the slightest provocation. Nat's unquestioned superiority to his schoolmates evokes a disquisition for the encouragement of dull boys, in which we are told that "the great philosopher, Newton, was one of the dullest scholars in school when he was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... found in the world, and their ideals are suggested by very common sensations. Had they been invented, by some inexplicable parthenogenesis in thought, it would indeed have been a marvel had they found application. Philosophy has enough notions of this inapplicable sort—usually, however, not very recondite in their origin—to show that dialectic, when it seems to control existence, must have taken more than one hint from the subject world, and that in the realm of logic, too, nothing submits to be ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... summer, the region enters on the glacial state, and its conditions undergo a great revolution, the consequences of which are so momentous that we shall have to trace them in some detail. Fortunately, the considerations which are necessary are not recondite, and all the facts are of an extremely ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... occasionally her nonchalant petulant gaze would wander up and down her bare arms and across her bosom. At intervals, with her ringed fingers she would lift the short skirt—a nothing, an imperceptibility, half an inch, with glance downcast; and the effect was profound, recondite, inexplicable. Her style was not that of a male dog-dancer, but it was indubitably clog-dancing, full of marvels to the connoisseur, and to the profane naught but a highly complicated series of wooden noises. Florence's face began to perspire. Then the concertina ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... might to their edification, we shall pass it over with very brief mention. Suffice it to say, that the oration was so thickly interstrewn with lengthy quotations from the fathers,—Chrysostomus, Hieronymus, Ambrosius, Basilius, Bernardus, and the rest, with whose recondite Latinity, notwithstanding the clashing of their opinions with his own, the doctor was intimately acquainted, and which he moreover delighted to quote,—that his auditors were absolutely mystified and perplexed, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... fine Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now almost effaced sundials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... in the schoolroom or at church on Sundays. Shakespeare quotes or adapts biblical phrases with far greater frequency than he makes allusion to episodes in biblical history. But many such phrases enjoyed proverbial currency, and others, which were more recondite, were borrowed from Holinshed's 'Chronicles' and secular works whence he drew his plots. As a rule his use of scriptural phraseology, as of scriptural history, suggests youthful reminiscence and the assimilative tendency of the mind in a stage of early development rather than close ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... trees in the Garden of Eden like a husbandman; and planted therein the tree of life perceptible to the eyes and to the senses, which gave life to the eater; and another tree which gave to the eater a knowledge of good and evil? I believe that everybody must regard these as figures under which a recondite sense is concealed." Let us, then, follow up the suggestion of this early Father of the Church, and enquire what may be the "recondite sense" concealed under this figure of the two trees. On the face of the story there are two roots, one of Life and the other of ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... tranquillity, but not he who cherishes desire for all earthly objects. Such a person becomes happy in consequence of the fruition of all his wishes, and not he who cherishes desire for earthly objects. The latter, even if he attains to heaven, has to fall away from it.[1072] The Vedas have truth for their recondite object. Truth hath the subjugation of the senses for its recondite object. The subjugation of the senses hath charity for its recondite object. Charity hath penance for its recondite object. Penance hath renunciation for its recondite object. Renunciation hath ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... great pains to preserve the bodies of their dead. It has been supposed that no common motive could have animated them to such lavish expenditure of money, time, and labor as the process of embalming required. It has been taken for granted that only some recondite theological consideration could explain this phenomenon. Accordingly, it is now the popular belief that the Egyptians were so scrupulous in embalming their dead and storing them in repositories of eternal stone, because ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Marietta. But then, risking her own interpretation of the recondite word, "Oh, no, Signorino. He ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... were over-desirous of earning A repute among noodles for classical learning, I could pick you a score of allusions, i-wis, As new as the jests of Didaskalos tis; 340 Better still, I could make out a good solid list From authors recondite who do not exist,— But that would be naughty: at least, I could twist Something out of Absyrtus, or turn your inquiries After Milton's prose metaphor, drawn from Osiris; But, as Cicero says he won't say this or that (A fetch, I must say, most transparent and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... publish it to the world. I could not tell the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and functions of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination afterwards found me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer in several places from their unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness of their ingenious ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... In Zamboanga I had the pleasure of meeting an enthusiastic propagandist, who assured me with pride that he had drawn quite a number of christian natives from their old belief. His sincerity of purpose enlisted my admiration, but his explanation of the advantages accruing to his neophytes was too recondite for my understanding. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... and remember the many phrases to which he gave birth or currency: "predatory wealth," "bull moose," "hit the line hard," "weasel words," "my hat is in the ring," and so on. He took a humorous delight in mystifying the public with recondite allusions, sending everyone to the dictionary to look out "Byzantine logothete," and to the Bible and cyclopedia to ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... forming a just Stile; where it is said, "It must be a great fault of Judgment if where the Thoughts are proper, the Expressions are not so too: A Disagreement between these seldom happens, but among Men of more recondite Studies, and what they call deep Learning, especially among your Antiquaries and Schoolmen." This is a good careless way of talking, it may pass well enough for the genteel Negligence, in short, such Nonsense, as Our Antiquaries are ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... controversy, but of the combatants. "Local colour" is laid on with an unsparing hand, though it cannot be said that the atmosphere is really Greek. There is hardly a line, there is never a page, without an allusion to some recondite thing: Athenian customs, Greek names, the plays of Euripides, above all, the plays of Aristophanes. "Every line of the poem," it has been truly said, "shows Mr. Browning as soaked and steeped in the comedies as was ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... liberties which Debussy even then was taking with established and revered traditions. He performed his military service upon his return from Rome; and there is a tradition told, as bearing upon his love of recondite sonorities, to the effect that while at Evreux he delighted in the harmonic clash caused by the simultaneous sounding of the trumpet call for the extinguishing of lights and the sustained vibrations of some neighboring convent bells. From this time forward his output was persistent and moderately ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... charcoal-warmers! Prone, outstretched, trembling, Like him, half dead and cold, whose feet one warm'th— And shaken, ah! by unfamiliar fevers, Shivering with sharpened, icy-cold frost-arrows, By thee pursued, my fancy! Ineffable! Recondite! Sore-frightening! Thou huntsman 'hind the cloud-banks! Now lightning-struck by thee, Thou mocking eye that me in darkness watcheth: —Thus do I lie, Bend myself, twist myself, convulsed With all eternal torture, And smitten By thee, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... recondite about it. There are a great many philosophers—let us say Plato, Aristotle, Antisthenes, and your spiritual fathers, Chrysippus, Zeno, and all the rest of them; what was it that induced you, leaving the rest alone, to pick out the school you did from among them all, ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... spectral purity, under constant illumination—this is all that is required. The variations due to the grosser factors I have mentioned—such as condition of attention, physical unrest, disturbing noises, sights, etc.—are of greater influence than any of these more recondite variations in the stimulus. Intensity and lustre, however, are certainly important. It is possible, by carefully choosing a room of pretty constant daylight illumination, and setting the experiments at the same hour each day, to secure a regular degree of brightness if the colours themselves are ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... purpose. Their tastes do not lead them thither. They go no oftener than serves their purpose. Not so with the learned German beer-drinker. He is in his own proper society. Chinese or Sanscrit, Arabic or Coptic, the last discoveries in the interior of Africa or about the North Pole, or the more recondite regions of chemistry or mineralogy, may be the theme of a familiar discourse, which each of the party ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his "hand" in it. He never liked to hear any one else play the piano, still less the violin; concerts of all sorts were likely to bore him; and he never really rose to an understanding of the more recondite and elaborate musical forms: to have his fingers on the keyboard—especially when improvising in a secure inarticulateness—was his ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... at South Kensington will do much to remove it. Not so many people, perhaps, believe that a whale is a fish, instead of a mammal, but few indeed are the individuals who do not still think that a cetacean possesses a sort of natural fountain on the top of its head, whence, for some recondite reason, it ejects at regular intervals streams of water ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... Commentaries of Blackstone, that, "no inconsiderable pains have been bestowed in analysing the word 'Parliament;'" and after adducing several amusing instances of the attempts that have been made (and those too by men of the most recondite learning) to arrive at its true radical properties, he concludes his remarks ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... anonymous but admirable Culina, all concur in their testimony to the enormous amount of animal food which went to make an ordinary meal, and the amazing variety of irreconcilable ingredients which were combined in a single dish. Lord Beaconsfield, whose knowledge of this recondite branch of English literature was curiously minute, thus describes—no doubt from authentic sources—a family dinner at the end of ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... came over to study his Roman roads with Major Flint that evening, and indeed he was a sombre antiquarian himself. They had pondered a good deal during the day over their strange reception in the High Street that morning and the recondite allusions to bags, sand-dunes and early trains, and the more they pondered the more probable it became that not only was something up, but, as regards the duel, everything was up. For weeks now they had been regarded by the ladies of Tilling ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... life he removed to the frontier of Arkansas, and pursued for some years the avocation of village schoolmaster. It was the suggestion of Judge Wheeler that induced him to read law. In six months' time he had mastered Story's Equity, and gained an important suit, based upon one of its most recondite principles. But his heart was not in the legal profession, and he made almost constant sallies into the fields of science, literature and art. He was a natural mathematician and was the most profound and original arithmetician in the Southwest. He frequently ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... visible and sensible universe— ta aistheta, as distinguished from ta noita. Origen lays down the rule in express terms. '"The number five,"' he says, '"frequently, nay almost always, is taken for the five senses."' In another passage, Keble deals with an even more recondite question. He quotes the teaching of St. Barnabas that 'Abraham, who first gave men circumcision, did thereby perform a spiritual and typical action, looking forward to the Son'. St. Barnabas's argument is as follows: ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... and in a MS. Pontifical of the church of Apamea, ap. Martene. As Thomassin observes, "we light a candle divided into three in honour of the Trinity, considering that enlightened by Christ we know that recondite mystery". Gavant also gives the same explanation. In the Greek service the bishop gives his blessing, as often as he sings mass, with a triple candle. In the Latin church it is ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... English readers with apologetic explanations as though his art were recondite and the tendency of his work immoral would be ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... headquarters. To the doctor, with his special conception of this political crisis, the removal of the silver had seemed an irrational and ill-omened measure. It was as if a general were sending the best part of his troops away on the eve of battle upon some recondite pretext. The whole lot of ingots might have been concealed somewhere where they could have been got at for the purpose of staving off the dangers which were menacing the security of the Gould Concession. The Administrador had acted as if the immense and powerful prosperity of the mine had been ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... account best perceive the nice distinctions and relations, in the exact perception and observance of which the highest manners consist. Such an one may offend against the last device in costume—and the last refinement in the recondite art of a bow—but he will eternally excel in all that we mean by breeding. Your bishop I know nothing of, but your account of him strikes me not very agreeably. These Christian bishops, methinks, are taking upon themselves too much. And besides, if what I ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... alliances, may have come into play. Mr. W. Adam, on the other hand, concludes that related marriages are prohibited and viewed with repugnance from the confusion which would thus arise in the descent of property, and from other still more recondite reasons; but I cannot accept this view, seeing that the savages of Australia and South America,[268] who have no property to bequeath or fine moral feelings to confuse, hold the crime ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... collapse. The excitement of choosing our rulers is prevented by the apparent existence of an unchosen ruler. The poorer and more ignorant classes—those who would most feel excitement, who would most be misled by excitement—really believe that the Queen governs. You could not explain to them the recondite difference between "reigning" and "governing"; the words necessary to express it do not exist in their dialect; the ideas necessary to comprehend it do not exist in their minds. The separation of principal power from principal station is a refinement which they could not even conceive. ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... exact meaning and nature and value; and it is one of the primary objects of these discussions to do away with certain current errors of judgment about it. It is often supposed to be a remote and recondite subject, intelligible only to the technical expert in knowledge, and apart from the everyday world of life. It is more often conceived as a metaphysical and philosophical system, something antagonistic ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... overlooked, they are in general only for the most obvious ideas and expressions, lying right in the path of any poet treating the subject. Je l'aurais bien pris sans toi. When, as in the instance above quoted, he borrows anything more recondite, he so exalts and transforms it that it passes from the original author to him like an angel the former has entertained unawares. This may not entirely apply to the Italian reformer, Bernardino Ochino, to whom, rather than ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... which, during his long recess, he had been digging so indefatigably, to furnish materials for solid and durable structures, rising in honourable and gratifying contrast to the fabrics which had preceded them. In 1671 came forth his "Metallographia, or History of Metals,"[28] in which all that recondite learning and extensive observation could bring together, on a subject which experiment had scarcely yet placed upon a rational basis, is collected. He styles himself on the Title page, "Practitioner ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... peeping acutely into recondite motives and half-accomplished purposes in such matters, could detect the circumstance which had determined that so noticeable peculiarity of ground-plan. Its kernel was not, as in most similar buildings of that date, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... word 'apperception' flourished in their eyes and ears as it nowadays often is, embodies as much of this mystification as any other single thing. The conscientious young teacher is led to believe that it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by losing the true inwardness of which her whole career may be shattered. And yet, when she turns to the books and reads about it, it seems so trivial and commonplace a matter,—meaning nothing more than the manner in which we receive a ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... threadbare. One unfortunate instance may be found at the beginning of the second volume. Mr. Linden's acquirements are to receive peculiar lustre from a triumph over no ordinary competitor,—over the intelligent and well-read Doctor Harrison. Naturally, we expect something recondite, and are by no means ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... much in the Talmud that possesses a recondite, spiritual meaning; but it would likely puzzle the most ingenious and learned modern Rabbis to construe into mystical allegories such absurd legends regarding ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... to this little bit Is anything you make of it. Such recondite philosophy Is far away too ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... is another subject connected with our firmament, of a more subtle and recondite character than even its colour. I mean that 'mysterious and beautiful phenomenon,' as Sir John Herschel calls it, the polarization of the light of the sky. Looking at various points of the blue firmament through a Nicol prism, and turning the prism round its axis, ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... of Yuan Shih-kai by all officials throughout the country was soon to be ordered; sycophantic scholars were busily preparing a volume poetically entitled "The Golden Mirror of the Empire," in which the virtues of the new sovereign were extolled in high-sounding language. A recondite significance, it was said, was to be given to the old ceremonial dress, which was to be revived, from the fact that every official would carry a Hu or Ivory Tablet to be held against the breast. The very mention of this was sufficient ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... is good and loving too. The web is of one texture throughout. The least educated ear can catch the music of the simpler melodies which run through the Great Composer's work. We shall one day be able to appreciate the yet fuller music of the more recondite parts, which to us at present seem only jangling and discord. It is not His melody but our ears that are at fault. But we may well accept the obscurity of the mighty deep of God's judgment, when we can see plainly that, after all, the earth is full of His mercy, and that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... perhaps too well known and estimated to require from us any thing more than a rapid enumeration of the most popular, as supplementary to this brief memoir. In his studies he exhibits great fondness for recondite subjects; and will frequently spend days in minute investigations into languages, which, in the result, are of little moment. But his ever-delightful theme is Greece, her arts, and literature. There he is at home: it was his earliest, and will, probably, be his latest study. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 407, December 24, 1829. • Various
... preparation needed is not to have learned facts three or five or ten years in advance, when theories and appliances may have been very different, but to have taken up one subject after another, finding how to master principles and details. This new subject is not recondite nor are we unconquerably stupid. To learn as we go—discere ambulando—need not turn the home into an ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... eloquently with some congenial visitor, or chatting with his daughter. One could almost see a small throng of serious men and women wending their way up the still plainly marked path to the chapel, and catch the measured tones of the lecturer as he expounded theories too recondite for this practical age ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... cast-off suspenders which long garlanded a coffee-mill pendent from the roof, a newly added second-hand india-rubber ear-trumpet. Here and there, however, I hope a finer soul will relish, as I do, the poetry of thus buying and offering for sale the very most recondite, as well as the commonest articles of commerce, in the faith that one day the predestined purchaser will appear and carry off the article appointed him from the beginning of time. This faith is all the more touching, because the collector cannot expect to live until the whole stock ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... These works, too recondite to be popular, and too unsatisfactory to be dangerous, do not appear likely to affect largely the English inquirer; but the case is different with the work which next meets us by another author, "the Creed of Christendom,"(929) which, on account of its clearness ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... forth not unfrequent mirth among those who most revered him. He would meet you and look you in the face without speaking a word. He was not without humour; but his jokes, carried off by a little laugh of his own, were apt to be recondite in their meaning and allusions. With his great power of sympathy, he yet did not easily divine other men's lighter or subtler moods, and odd and sometimes even distressing mistakes were the consequence. His health was weak, and a chronic tenderness of throat and chest ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... the most recondite sciences, the most remarkable productions of earth, in respect of animals, vegetables, and minerals, the classified arrangement of the stars of heaven, are ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... producing in the end a great book: his one life-work. This famous work, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium," embodied all his painstaking calculations, applied his new system to each of the bodies in the solar system in succession, and treated besides of much other recondite matter. Towards the close of his life it was put into type. He can scarcely be said to have lived to see it appear, for he was stricken with paralysis before its completion; but a printed copy was brought to his bedside and put into his hands, so that he might just ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... pretty well forgotten, though the authors who wrote in it are still preserved in French translations. The younger Madame Dacier insists that this lady was against all men, and that it ought to be spelled anti; but this Kennicotus, a rabbi of the most recondite learning, with much critical wrath, vehemently contradicts, affirming it to have been impossible she could have been against mankind whom all mankind admired. He adds that ante is for antelope, and is emblematically used to express an elegant and slender animal, or that it is an elongation ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... led to think that a writer would not use such very decided language unless he had obtained a thorough mastery of his subject; and when he finds the notes thronged with references to the most recondite sources of information, he at once credits the author with an 'exhaustive' knowledge of the literature bearing upon it. It becomes important therefore to inquire whether the writer shows that accurate acquaintance ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... faint before the most torturing pains or most disastrous strokes of evil, who holds firmly the plain teaching of Scripture on these two points. They all come from my Father, and they all come for my good. It is a short and simple creed, easily apprehended. It pretends to no recondite wisdom. It is a homely philosophy which common intellects can grasp, which children can understand, and hearts half paralysed by sorrow can take in. So much the better. Grief and pain are so common that their cure had need ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... attacked by that terrible malady, that fever for liberty, which drives prisoners to those heroic efforts of which the prodigious achievements seem to us impossible, though true, and which my friend the doctor" (and he turned to Bianchon) "would perhaps ascribe to some unknown forces too recondite for his physiological analysis to detect, some mysteries of the human will of ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... neither the Tendai doctrines nor the Shingon conceptions were sufficiently simple to supply a remedy. Something more tangible and less recondite was needed, and it came (1196), in the sequel of twenty-five years' meditation and study, to Genku—posthumously called Honen Shonin—a priest of the Tendai sect. The leading characteristics of the Jodo (pure land) system introduced by him are easily stated. "Salvation is by faith, but ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... recognition of the apocalyptic fact that a workman can only be known by his work, and that without examination of his method and material that work can hardly be studied to much purpose, they have yet to add the knowledge of a further truth no less recondite and abstruse than this; that as the technical work of a painter appeals to the eye, so the technical work of a poet appeals to the ear. It follows that men who have none are as likely to arrive at any profitable ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... garbled &c (indistinct) 447; perplexed &c. (confused) 59; undetermined, vague, loose, ambiguous; mysterious; mystic, mystical; acroamatic[obs3], acroamatical[obs3]; metempirical; transcendental; occult, recondite, abstruse, crabbed. inconceivable, inconceptible[obs3]; searchless[obs3]; above comprehension, beyond comprehension, past comprehension; beyond one's depth; unconceived. inexpressible, undefinable, incommunicable. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... my own private opinion that these mystic words contain some prodigiously recondite meaning; or, perhaps, arise from one of those awful incidents, of which Hoffman encountered so many among the ghost-seeing, all-believing Germans. But don't take it on my simple assertion, but judge for yourself. I shall tell you, word for word, the story ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... a human, the results to him of these contacts were sensations. Just like a human, these sensations on occasion culminated in emotions. Still further, like a human, he could and did perceive, and such perceptions did flower in his brain as concepts, certainly not so wide and deep and recondite as those ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... chief place in the education of the majority of mankind, leave one important thing out of their account: the constitution of human nature. But I put this forward on the strength of some facts not at all recondite, very far from it; facts capable of being stated in the simplest possible fashion, and to which, if I so state them, the man of science will, I am sure, be willing ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... his words, and still more his manner, had awakened in me a sense of insecurity that had no precise object, for it was manifestly absurd and impossible to suspect my friend Carlos. Moreover, hanging was a danger so recondite, and an eventuality so extravagant, as to make the whole thing ridiculous. And yet I remembered how unhappy I felt, how inexplicably unhappy. Presently the reason was made clear. I was homesick. I gave no further thought to the second mate. I looked at the harbour we were entering, and thought ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... friendships of our history. Marshall's "original bias," to quote Story's own words, "as well as the choice of his mind, was to general principles and comprehensive views, rather than to technical or recondite learning." Story's own bias, which was supported by his prodigious industry, was just the reverse. The two men thus supplemented each other admirably. A tradition of some venerability represents Story as having said that Marshall was wont to remark: "Now Story, that is the law; you find the precedents ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... of old English lyrics is a treasure if one can depend upon the correctness of printing and punctuating. Mrs. Richardson has found a quantity of rather recondite ones, and most of the favorites are given too. Only to read her long index of first lines is to catch a succession of dainty fancies and of exquisite rhythms, arranged when the language was crystallizing into beauty under the fanning wings ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... fresh ice, but he had brought the particular kind of rusk for which I had asked. There were over thirty dishes on the emblazoned menu, and of course I had wanted something that was not on it: a peculiar rusk, a rusk recondite and unheard of by my fellow-diners. The man had hopefully said that he "would see." And here lay the rusk, magically obtained. I felicitated him, as an equal. And then, having consumed the ice and the fruits of ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... 'Privit Orth'ris,' 'Mistah Or—ther—ris!' 'Deah boy,' 'Cap'n Orth'ris,' 'Field-Marshal Orth'ris,' 'Stanley, you pen'north o' pop, come 'ere to your own comp'ny!' And the Cockney, who had been delighting another audience with recondite and Rabelaisian yarns, was shot down among his admirers by the ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... opinions were of importance to her niece. Althea shrank from open combat with anybody, yet she could, under cover of gentle candour, plant her shafts. She planted one now in answering: 'I don't think that you would, either of you, take to one another. Helen's flavour is rather recondite.' ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... differ from the preacher in some things, and listen doubtfully to others. But I know of no modern sermons at once so suggestive and so inspiriting, with reference to the whole range of Christian duty. He is fresh and original without being recondite: plain-spoken without severity; and discusses some of the exciting topics of the day without provoking strife or lowering his tone as a Christian teacher. He delivers his message, in fact, like one who is commissioned to call men off from trifles and squabbles, and conventional sins and follies, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... appeal in the hazard of her venture with Captain Goritz. He was a clever man and a dangerous one, who, to gain his ends, whatever they were, would not hesitate to stoop to means beneath the dignity of honorable manhood—an intriguer, a master craftsman in the secret and recondite, a perverted gentleman, trained in a school which eliminated compassion, sentiment and all other human attributes in the attainment of its object and the consummation of its plans. And yet Marishka did not fear Captain Goritz. There is a kind of ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... experiences when he thinks of himself as a speck on the surface of the earth, which itself is but a speck in the immensity of the universe. And when a man of mere ordinary culture sees Sir William Thomson surveying that field with a mastery of its details and familiarity with all the recondite methods of its investigation, he feels as nothing in his presence. Yet this great man, whom we cannot help regarding with wonder, is so carried away by the spirit of his class as to say, "Science is bound, by the everlasting law of honor, to face fearlessly every problem which ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... and the figure of the sun, a circle, corresponds to nothing animate but a serpent with its tail in its mouth, eating itself, as it were, this may have been its origin. Either of them is more likely than that the symbol arose from the recondite reflection that time is "never ending, still beginning, still creating, still ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... productions were heard. These were Parry's "King Saul"—a very recondite, musicianly composition—but too long; "The Swan and the Skylark," a fanciful little cantata by Goring Thomas; and a "Stabat ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton |
